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Offer up

I don’t know if you’re familiar with these apps like offer up or letgo, but they’re essentially a garage sale on your phone or tablet. For the uninitiated, here’s how it works:

You and your wife decide to unclutter your home. She suggests selling some of your nicer belongings rather than donating them all to the closest charitable second hand shop. She takes a few pictures and loads them on her phone and presto, you have a sale on.

But wait, it’s not over yet! Pretty soon you are on the ladder clearing clutter in another room or in the garage when a potential customer asks for dimensions on the desk you just moved into the hallway. Your wife wants to answer right away so you stop what you’re doing, dig out the tape measure from the box you just used to clean out the junk drawer in order to text back this lady the height-width-depth of said desk.

Back up the ladder. You uncover an old photo book and start flipping through it’s pages. You hear your wife’s phone chime.

“Honey?, does the desk come apart? They don’t think it’ll fit in their van.”

“Nope” you reply. It’s a fantastic deal for this desk, if they want it they’ll figure it out, right?

“You didn’t even look! Just look”

You tell your wife you will in just a minute. You are fascinated with these photos.

By the time you get to the desk (5 minutes) and figure out you can partially disassemble it, the text has already been delivered that it can’t. They inform your wife that they can borrow a truck but it’ll be a while, is your price firm? So a few texts have to let the other party know where your current progress is. And for all that effort, you’re now down five bucks.

They aren’t texting back. You move onto emptying out the closet in your son’s room that has been a catch all for toys and knick-knacks for 3 years. There’s a train set that you only used for a week before he lost interest in there. This would sell on the app, lets see if all the parts are here.

Your wife supervising lets you know that you’re doing it all wrong when she gets another text. The desk people ask if they can pick it up at noon or so. “Tell ’em that works for me.”

At this point, a few of the smaller items posted are getting attention. Instead of having people show up to the house, your wife agrees to meet everyone at the local Target. She grabs all the sh, stuff and loads the Kia to head to target.

Now the train set is assembled and working, you snap a pic, measure the track, and write a thorough description to send your wife to post online. Next project is clearing the closet under the stairs. Your boy is helping you, well, at least he’s asking you “What’s that?” about every single thing you touch.

Your phone chimes, someone wants to know what batteries are required for the train set operation. Drop what your doing, head up to the kiddos room, head back to the junk drawer box to dig out a precision Phillip’s head screwdriver because the friggin dude in Taiwan neglected to indicate the battery size on the outside of the train engine. Your wife texts back WELL? I’M WAITING. You don’t text back what you’re thinking. When you flip off the phone your boy asks “what’s that?”

Two AAA per engine.

Back to the closet, your wondering how in the hell have you accumulated all this stuff? Motorcycle chaps? You haven’t owned a bike for about 7 years now! Shaking your head when you hear the door bell.

There’s a guy at your door that looks like he’s got about twenty four other things he’d rather be doing than picking up some desk his wife wants. You kindly show him how you took it apart so he can assemble it later. You help him load it into his minivan as he describes why they were looking for the desk in the first place. It’s cliche man chat that essentially tells each other that it’s all the wives fault that we are meeting each other, I feel your pain bro, I’m here too.

I think we’ll get a lot of use out of this desk. I put myself into his shoes for the 90 seconds it took him to answer the door.
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